Mandriva 2007 will have support for 3D desktop effects through Xgl/AIGLX. The choice between AIGLX and Xgl will be made automatically according to the graphic card driver possibilities. The support is currently being tested in Mandriva Cooker, and will work for both GNOME and KDE through Free as well as proprietary drivers.

At installation drakx11 will enable or disable Composite accordingly. For example example Composite is disabled by default for nvidia cards ( with proprietary drivers ) as this may be counter-productive for XGL.
At the contrary Composite is activated by default for Intel graphic chipsets ( thus allowing AIGLX usage ).

last time I checked (maybe a year ago) Mandriva was not really stable.
It didn't crash but there were some problems which appeared and disappeared randomly and it seemed to have quite some bugs.
Maybe it just didn't like my hardware, don't know...
It would also mess up its partition from time to time while all other distros thought the harddisk was just fine.
But I liked the general look and feel and it was really easy to use.

I know there was issue with Nforce chipset and APIC. Now this is solved. On mots computer I tried latest Mandriva, it was rock solid ( especially after removing kat ).
2007 seems to be stable, but the bugs relies mostly on design change ( switch to XDG menu, usage of Gnome 2.16 beta 2 for which printers doesn't work, ... ).
Besides that most software seem to be stable.

Mandriva is targetting serious computer users and businesses with a yearly release. The product is more stable, more maintenable and less prone to last-minute desing changes.

Overall, I expect this release to be one of Mandriva's best as it has steadily been improving by leaps and bounds after falling short a couple of years ago.

Its software installation tool (urpmi) is also light years ahead of the zmd crap tool that Suse is using in its last releases.

Distributions have this silly ability to shoot themselves in the foot for no good reason. Mandrake did it before and now Suse is doing it. Suse had a proven and tested technology in yast, but the ximian monkeys prioritize politics over technological merit to the extent that they have made an otherwise great release (SLED) unworkable for people like us.

At one of the non-profits where I do consulting work, we were looking to use SLED. Not now, I cannot trust the engineering work of a company that produces last minute crap such as the zen updater built on top of the overhyped and slow mono framework.

Once I see Suse's old QA and engineering back at the helm with KDE as a first-class citizen of the desktop, I will rethink my loyalties. For now, Mandriva is looking mighty good.

I'm also disappointed at the lack of KDE emphasis in the mainline distros - something of a turnaround compared to a few years ago. However, I'm glad to see that companies including Novell are investing development effort in KDE (cf. the modified start menu shown yesterday).

I've been running Xgl on Kubuntu for a few days now, and have generally found (nb. with my particular CVS snapshot) that Xgl is solid, but I need to restart compiz every so often. I'm amazed how quickly this technology is progressing - the ATI drivers I had a few months ago crashed and burned every time I ran Xgl for more than a few minutes.

Side note: the Nvidia drivers should have composite turned off in the "host" X server when running Xgl, but composite is still provided by Xgl itself. Nvidia users don't have to forgo using composite

Fedora Core 6 is also scheduled to be released on about the same timeframe according to its schedule[1], and it will feature AIGLX+Compiz as an easily selectable option (Desktop menu --> Preferences --> Effects --> "Enable Desktop Effects"). It (at least, what will hopefully become FC6) already is extremely awesome on my Radeon 9250. Thus we will see definite increases in the eye candy and usability of the Free desktop.

As an aside, I think this will also be a major push to NVidia/ATi to produce AIGLX-accelerating drivers.